Hamas Anwar, 28, and Tiffany Harvey, 26, operators of Fantasy World Escorts, leave court in London after launching a constitutional challenge to Canada?s three-year-old prostitution laws Tuesday. They face 29 counts after a seven-month London police probe in 2015. (JANE SIMS, The London Free Press)

What’s believed to be the first constitutional challenge to Canada’s three-year old prostitution laws has taken its first steps in a London courtroom.

And, like the Bedford case four years ago that struck down Canada’s old laws, whatever happens in the case of Hamad Anwar, 28, and Tiffany Harvey, 26, the operators of Fantasy World Escorts, could end up in the Supreme Court of Canada.

Pressure has been growing on the new law since it was passed three years ago by the Conservative government with calls out to the ruling Liberals to re-visit the issue.

Bill C-36, outlaws buying sex, but not selling it. Also added were new provisions allowing for the prosecution of those who advertise sex work, and make money off sex workers.

The new laws were a response to the Supreme Court’s Bedford ruling, named for the dominatrix who challenged the law, which said the old laws violated the right to security.

Anwar and Harvey’s case seems custom-made to challenge the new provisions. They were charged in November 2015 after police raided Fantasy World Escorts after a seven-month London police investigation and were charged with 29 offences including receiving material benefit from someone else’s sexual services, procurement and advertising.

On Tuesday, the pair sat in the front row of the courtroom while their Toronto-based defence lawyers James Lockyer and Jack Gemmell outlined the core of their challenge on those three areas of the new law that goes to the legitimacy of the business.

The Crown is calling Maddy Coy, the deputy director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit at London Metropolitan University and advocate of the Nordic model on which Canada’s new laws were based, and Indigenous activist Cherry Smiley of Concordia University.

Atchison, from the University of Victoria, is on the side of a harm-reduction decriminalized model that sees the “sex industry” and the people in it as making a choice to be involved in it.

Atchison called the other side the “prohibitionist” — others call it abolitionist — who see prostitution as a form of violence against women.

One of the abolitionists in the courtroom was London Abused Women’s Centre executive director Megan Walker who has championed the Nordic model.

Atchison outlined the challenges in collecting data on sex work because there is no empirical way of knowing how many people are engaged in it. Much of the data often comes from on-street women, who are often impoverished, homeless and drug-addicted.

But he said, the new laws may have “exacerbated their vulnerability” by cutting them off from services and communication and leaving them stigmatized.

Also the number of on-street sex work has diminished over the past 20 years with people migrating to off-street work, making contacts easily online.

He agreed that there are a disproportionate number of Indigenous women on the streets selling sex.

But, he said, the new laws do nothing to help them get the services they need and conditions have “worsened.”

Atchison said third parties, like businesses, help ensure health and safety.

“Like any business owner, they have to be able to pay for the function of their business,” Atchison said.

In cross-examination, assistant Crown attorney Michael Carnegie pointed out that people entering the sex trade are entering at young ages and are subject to exploitation.

Atchison admitted he hasn’t studied sex trafficking but said he believes there is a distinction between it and adult sex services.

Outside of court, Walker said she wasn’t surprised by the defence arguments.

“I stand very firmly and solidly behind the current legislation and think it would pass muster,” Walker said.

She said the abolitionist argument also has “a harm-reduction model” by working on criminalizing those who choose to buy sex.

“We want to abolish prostitution because we know it is inherently violent and proportionately negatively impacts on women and particularly Indigenous women and girls,” she said.

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